Marathon Man

…for the director’s next project, Marathon Man (1976). In that compelling thriller, Hoffman played a Jewish graduate student who by degrees finds himself matching wits with a surpassingly evil Nazi-in-hiding (Laurence Olivier, in an Academy Award-nominated performance) who has slain the student’s brother, a rogue Central Intelligence Agency operative (Roy…

…Oscar nomination for best actor), Marathon Man (1976, Oscar nomination for best supporting actor), the television films Love Among the Ruins (1975) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1976), and the British miniseries Brideshead Revisited (1981). It was also during this period that Olivier was suddenly and inexplicably stricken…

… (1974), a thriller that he adapted for the screen two years later. He also wrote one of his best screenplays, an adaptation of the Watergate exposé All the President’s Men (1976), which won him his second Academy Award.